FINNO-UGRIC AND INDO-EUROPEAN
VIEWPOINTS
The starting point of Indo-European pedagogic thinking is most frequently the individual, as a being in itself, and its inherent talents. According to the famous first sentence of Aristotle’s Metaphysics: “All men by nature desire to know.”239So self wants to “know” about self. The German philosopher-educationalist J. F. Herbart (1776-1841) on the other hand, sees the opportunity for education in general in that inborn nature of a child, that he is an unshaped, but shapable personality (Bildsamkeit).240In the thinking of Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), the founder of modern psychology, the existence of the other person is brought up too: “Children’s games are directed by the desire, more precisely the only desire, which aids the child in his growth, that he wants to get big and become an adult.”241Reworded from our point of view, that he wants to become like the other person, the adult. But the problem of Kant’s well-know educational paradox242is, how can a sense of freedom be developed in spite of restraint. After all, he believes that education is a process in which the child is of necessity subjected to training, to the will of the educator.243“It appears that for this (question), at least in the practical form conceived by Kant, no solution presents itself, and thus this (paradox) will still remain a starting point for modern education in the future.”244
The starting point for the philosophy of coordinating thinking is the person who cannot live a full life without his half. This mentality does not deny the propositions of Aristotle or Freud, according to which a person is born with a desire for knowledge, and an ambition to become an adult, but it tends to conceive all this in that the most important reason for this desire and ambition is not because a person is “unshaped”, but rather solitary. My ambition is to be a half to other people, and to become a man together with him/them. In order for me to be a half to (an)other(s), I have to learn their language, their customs, legal system, culture and accomplishments. And this is made possible by man’s typical, inborn empathic (linguistic and other) capabilities, with which he can identify with other people. The likewise inborn tendency to play is
239Arisztotelész 1936
distinguished from that of animals by this empathic skill, among other factors. What the Karácsony philosophy must disagree with, however, is that man must be subject to the educator, or to education. According to Karácsony, the man, the child is an autonomous being. For this reason, this type of education, from the very beginning, is doomed to failure.245 If we try something like this anyway, it can easily cause psychological damage, as can be observed in education under dictatorial systems.
After all, a person must protect his own autonomy, his own psychological-spiritual wholeness (identity, integration) at all costs, even unwittingly. (An interesting example of this from a social-psychological point of view can be seen in present-day Hungary, when people, within a short time following the so-called political changes, had access to new information of such force and in such quantity that had previously been denied them. Processing this while maintaining psychological wholeness was extremely difficult, and this could only be done slowly, or by many, not at all.) We can only and exclusively influence our halves (children or adults), through their social-psychological functions, and only slowly, gradually. To express it more practically, only if we do something for something together (with our halves, children or adults).
As a result of the above, pedagogy with a westernised (subordinating) approach, holds that the teacher (ger. der Lehrer) is authority itself, and the one to be trained is a child with defective knowledge, so knowledge has to be communicated to and planted into the child, in order for him not to be lacking in necessary learning in his future life.
With regard to taking the child into consideration, this pedagogy could only go so far as emphasising once again: the child must be motivated with respect to the material to be learnt. This does not resolve Kant’s paradox, however. In contrast, a pedagogue with a coordinating approach is the child’s (paratactic) half in recognising the world anew. All this does not in any way mean that the child is our half of a equal rank. The educator is always in front of the child on the scale of developmental steps in the social-psychological relationship. To concretise what has been said here with an example taken from linguistic and musical training. For a grammar teacher with a westernised, subordinating approach, the most important goal is for the child to learn the definition of what a verb is as soon as possible. This abstract definition is the goal of the instruction. If he is a good teacher, then he is even able to motivate the students in some way to do all this. The pedagogue with a coordinating approach is less interested in the final definition, which in any case can never be perfect. Thinking of the verb and becoming the child’s half, he discovers (once again) together with the children that certain phenomena and happenings in the world (for instance, things which happen in time) will always be expressed with the part of speech known as the verb, and these words will always have some feature in common (for example, they can be declined in the same way). And if they are getting to know a new, foreign language (the teacher and the children together becoming reacquainted with it), then there will be a group of words there too, which tackle things from the phenomena of the world in a similar way to the verbs of my native language, but these verbs of the
245Karácsony1995(1938) (Introduction)
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foreign language will have different features from the verbs of my mother tongue. In the music lesson with a westernised approach, we often hear expressions like this from the teacher: “This piece is so lovely, isn’t it?”, “Listen to how wonderful this violin concerto is!” In such cases, the teacher is trying to force the truths and views of his own autonomy into the student, against which the autonomy of the child will defend itself on some level. (If the pupil loves his teacher, or schoolmistress, then it may happen that he will, subconsciously, forgive her/him for this, and will himself try to enjoy the work, but this is education which has succeeded in an indirect way, which was not consciously intended.) A music teacher with a coordinating approach, listening to music with a child’s ear, will seek out appropriate works from the musical literature, and listening to or performing these together, will rediscover them for himself as well as for the child. Both of them marvel at the musical thoughts of some composer.
The German philosopher Karl Jaspers (1883-1969) seeks the answer to what we are as people in the following way:
“Let us look for examples of how man expresses his own ego; we can feel free to call our discoveries the activity of our consciousness. We ourselves, however, are more than our act of discovery, and also more than what we have ever been able to discover about ourselves. As to what we are in reality, science has never been able to give an answer to that and it still cannot; as always throughout history, this question is still enigmatic in the present.”246Finno-Ugric epistemology holds that raising this type of question which concentrates on “one’s own ego” is problematic in itself. As to the question of who I am, what we people are, it seeks the answer by researching into the relationship with the other person, and with other animate and inanimate things.
With the aid of a literary example taken from Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821-1881), Igor Smirnov (born 1941) seeks a solution to the problem of the alienation of an individual from himself in the following way: “I was always ridiculous, and I know it, maybe right from birth. Maybe from the age of seven I already knew I was ridiculous.
Then I went to school, then to the university, and what - the more I studied, the more I learned that I was ridiculous. So that for me, all my university education existed ultimately as if only to prove and explain to me, the deeper I went into it, that I was ridiculous. And as with learning, so with life. Every passing year the same consciousness grew and strengthened in me that my appearance was in all respects ridiculous. I was ridiculed by everyone and always. But none of them knew or suspected that if there was one man on earth who was more aware than anyone else of my ridiculousness, it was I myself, and this was the most vexing thing for me …”
(Dostoevsky: The dream of a ridiculous man) – quoted by Smirnov, who continues thus: “As is clear from the quotation, consciousness, which constantly grows as knowledge is acquired, alienates the individual from himself and makes him the object of self-ridicule. According to Dostoevsky, this situation can be resolved in one of two ways: by suicide, i.e. by murdering the ego alienated by consciousness, or by humanity returning to the Golden Age, into the world which lives in harmony with
246Jaspers 1977. p. 8-12.
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nature, and not striving to discover life, i.e. by renouncing consciousness.”247
The Finno-Ugric option is to find a solution to the phobia of ridiculousness, the phenomenon of the alienation of the individual, by forming a community with the other half. This solution does not renounce individual consciousness, but preserving its autonomy, seeks itself in a relationship with others (see Ady’s verse “Faithfulness of one hundred fidelities” quoted above), and thus the problem does not even arise in this form. A person like this does not ask, “what is the goal and meaning of my life?”, but “what and how can I and could I be party to, what can I, could I add to the life of my broader and narrower community?” In Ady’s words: “I have lived, because sometimes I lived – for others”.
247Smirnov 2000. p. 178-179. Cf. suggestions for a solution by Buddhist Zhuagzi, just quoted.
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